1983 Fazlur Rahman Khan International Fellowship
Werner Sobek

In my second year at the Institute for Solid Construction, I was notified that an international jury had nominated me at the recommendation of Jörg Schlaich for the very first Fazlur Rahman Khan International Fellowship. The award ceremony was to take place a week later at the University Club on New York’s 5th Avenue. I bought a ticket and turned up at the University Club at 8 p.m. The biggest names of the New York architecture and engineering scene were there. The men were mainly concerned with smoking enormous cigars and drinking cognac but it was against this backdrop, along with the accompanying gala dinner, that I was awarded the first Fazlur Rahman Khan International Fellowship. The prize has been awarded three times since then: the second went to a young town planner from India [Himanshu Parikh] and the third to Santiago Calatrava.

At the time, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill established an award in memory of their major partner Fazlur Rahman Khan, one of the most outstanding civil engineers of the twentieth century. The award was established to identify and support people who could potentially be possible successors to Fazlur Khan. The limiting conditions for the prize were formidable—I could do whatever I wanted with the prize money—the only condition was that the fund should be used to further my personal development. So I decided two things that very night: I would use part of the prize money to travel to North Yemen, a dangerous destination, the only thing about which I knew that there was beautiful architecture to be seen there, some of it dating back over several centuries and which was generally built on top of mountains. I decided to use the second part of the fund to stay in America and learn about how high-rise buildings are constructed. When Bruce Graham, one of the general partners and big names at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (and therefore on the American architecture scene) asked me how I wanted to do this, I replied that I would think it was best to learn from him directly as an apprentice. I actually expected to be politely turned down, but the opposite was true. Thus the following year, I started at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and started a phase of on-the-job training. First, however, I realized the dream I had had at the award ceremony of traveling to Yemen. At that point, I had long had a map of the world next to the breakfast table, which I would simply ponder, lost in thought. At that time, I decided to complete a series of journeys that I have completed throughout my life. The first journey was to North Yemen in 1983. The second was over the Karakoram and Himalayas and into the Chinese desert in 1987. The third major trip was through Patagonia to the most southerly town in the world in 2005. My last major journey will take me through the Sahara with a caravan of the Tuareg people.

The North Yemen embassy told us—that is, my wife, my research partner Matthias Jennewein, and I—that we could travel to Tais and Sana’a but that we would not be able to leave Sana’a (the capital of North Yemen). However, two weeks before our departure, we received notification that we would be able to travel through the country—probably as the first individual tourists to be able to do so. Until that point, only groups of people were allowed into the country for between seven and ten days and were charged prices that seemed absolutely astronomical to us.

We flew to Sana’a and traveled from there to the northwest but were held up at a military post just 10 km outside the capital. There, we had to enter our names and details in a big book, just in case we got lost, so that someone would know our last known coordinates. Entering our names in books at roadblocks continued every 20 to 30 km. What we experienced on the journey into the northwest of Yemen was one of the most beautiful experiences I have ever had: the Yemeni people have almost completely terraced the mountains so that they look like dark-brown architect’s model with contour lines; the individual terraces, which were generally planted with barley, vegetables, and sometimes nuts, were created using natural stone walls. Between these walls, which could be very high in places, 60 and 70-year-old Yemeni walked around barefoot or with simple plastic sandals, carrying enormous loads on their shoulders and heads, so that we, with our typically high-quality Western traveling clothes and good shoes could only stop and stare. It made us want to kick off our shoes and climb the mountains barefoot too.

The Yemeni always live on the top of the mountain or hill, not down in the valley like the Swabians. On top of the mountain, there are collections of houses that form a fortress, where each house represents a fortress itself. If you enter the ground floor of this house, you will probably see an opening like an arrow slit, which ensures that the goats, who live in the ground floor, can get a bit of fresh air. Food and supplies are kept on the first floor, where the windows are slightly bigger. The domestic rooms are on the second floor and the women’s quarters on the third. The fourth floor is usually for the children, while the men’s quarters are on the top floor, with their high, sometimes colorful, windows. These rooms are known as mafraj. This is where the men sit on mattresses after lunch and chew khat, a mild amphetamine-like drug. While they chew the khat, the men talk about this, that, and the other and look out of the huge windows over the mountains of Yemen. As we sat in a mafraj for the first time, it became clear to me that from then on, I always wanted to live at a height—because this endlessly wide vista also expands the soul and intellect.

A few months after returning to Germany, I interrupted my dissertation on concrete shells on pneumatically supported cladding to start at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago. It was not easy to interrupt a dissertation of this complexity for a year. However, I was extremely lucky to have two assistants, who were able to continue working in my absence on computer programs I had developed: Matthias Kintscher and Ulrike Wagner.

After arriving in Chicago, I got to know two people right away who would prove to play a decisive role in my future career. The first of these was someone who I did not meet face to face but who I heard speaking on the phone on the other side of a five-foot dividing wall for days. The phone conversations were relentless and exceptionally precise, as if they were describing a surgical procedure be carried out on the other end. I had never heard anything like it but admit that I could have listened to these phone calls for days.

One Friday afternoon, I found a yellow sticker on my desk: “You should see . . .” with a list of five important buildings. It was signed “Love (a hand-drawn heart), B.P.” But who was B.P.? I bought myself a map and realized that the only way I could see all these buildings over a weekend would be not to sleep at all. Therefore, I only managed three of the five and went back to the office on Monday feeling none too confident. Who was B.P.? The woman behind the dividing wall then came around to see me for the first time: “Did you see them all?” I had to admit that I had only managed to see three of them, which appeared to disappoint her so much that I had to explain myself, in order to then introduce herself: B.P. was Brigitte Peterhans, the elder sister of Jörg Schlaich. We developed a close friendship from that point on. Brigitte Peterhans practically took me by the arm and took me to the German consulate in Chicago as well as introduced me to other important families. She showed me the best music festivals, the best cinemas, and more. And she introduced me to Myron Goldsmith, one of the few architectural engineers at that point; Myron Goldsmith was no longer a partner at SOM after having suffered a stroke, but worked as a highly valued and popular lecturer for many generations of students at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Myron Goldsmith introduced me to IIT and it didn’t take long for me to get involved there on Saturday afternoons in order to help teach Myron’s students about the design and construction of gridshells, cable net structures, and other things. My link to IIT thus goes right back to 1984.

Myron Goldsmith and I developed a close teacher-pupil relationship, which led to him taking a small booklet out of his pocket one day: his master’s thesis. I opened it and read: “Thesis accepted: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 16 May 1953”—the very day I was born! The master’s thesis of Myron Goldsmith was one of the key breakthroughs in high-rise construction—as a student, he developed the principle of the diagonalized tube as well as the concept of the megaframe, elaborated on the concepts, and presented them with unbelievably detailed sketches and diagrams. His work lay forgotten for almost seven years until it found its way into the planning of the first tube in the Chestnut-Dewitt apartment building in Chicago, for which the architect Bruce Graham and the gifted engineer Fazlur Khan were celebrated as the creators—in spite of the fact that the basic concept and design, including all the details—right up to the reduced window size in the lower floors and the discussion of the ground level problem—had been developed by Myron Goldsmith back in 1953.

During my time in Chicago, I also got to know my peers; we looked up to the others but all went to lunch together on the fifth floor of the department store Carson, Pirie & Scott. There we all sat: Bill Baker, now head engineer at SOM and the person who designed and made all the calculations for the tallest building in the world (probably the best engineer of our age in terms of high-rise construction); Majoub El Nimeiri, now a professor at IIT; Joe Burns, currently a partner at Thornton Tomassetti, one of the best-known engineering firms in the US; and Richard Chiu, who now has his own firm in Bangkok. The only thing you had to watch out for when eating at “Carson Pirie” was that you didn’t get any marshmallows in your salad at the salad bar. I remain in close contact with Bill Baker, Joe Burns, Richard Chiu, and Majoub El Nimeiri to this day. It’s like a homecoming when we all get together again. Since developing these close friendships back then, Chicago has been my second hometown.